There is no real way to begin this story except by explaning what it was like to grow up in the Spargo household.    As a young child, largely because of my mother, I had a very loving environment.    Loving, but in many ways smothering.     My father was never a very openly affectionate person, except with very small children.    My mother was just the opposite.   Latin American women only know how to show love to children one way, and there is nothing reserved about it.    

To be perfectly blunt, things changed when I got older.    I'm not exactly sure where I got my stubborn and independent streak from, but it's the only way I can ever remember being.    And the day the hell began was the day I first put my foot down to do something my way.     Virtually every unhappy memory I have of growing up in the Spargo household is in someway connected to me wanting to do or say something that I was not allowed to do.  

All kids rebel.  It's part of being a kid.   All kids need discipline and a firm hand.   America these days is suffering greatly from two generations of parents that thought it was damaging to a kid to say no.   I don't begrudge my parents for raising me.    I don't begrudge them for doing the things they did when the need arose.    In that respect, I will always believe that no one did it better than they did when it came time to correct problems.   When it came time to take steps and make sure I would grow up into a mature and responsible adult.     Good parenting begins and ends with a fair and firm hand, and with setting a good example.     But with my parents it didn't really end there.    That was only the beginning.

It's a very Spargo male thing to go through life with a chip on your shoulder.   Every generation of Spargo men has had one.    For my grandfather, it was being treated like shit because he wasn't the oldest son and not the heir to the family fortune, no matter what he accomplished.     For my father, it was his bitterness over not being able to finish college, and how poorly he has been treated his whole professional life because of it.     After my father dropped out of college, he went to the Air Force for four years and worked on nuclear missile guidance.    Right after he got out and married my mother, he got a job with the National Radio Astrononmy Observatory, where he has been for nearly forty years.      He was, and still is one of the hardest working and most dedicated employees they ever had.    He knows so much about the VLA, that he is always the one they call on to give tours to VIPs, and to assist visitors.     He earned his way into a social circle in the radio astronomy community normally reserved for PhDs and famous scientists.    But because he never had the letters behind his name, there wasn't a single day of his entire career where some bitter and snobby astronomer or engineer didn't put him in his place because they didn't think he deserved to be a member of their club.     No accomplishment of any kind at the VLA ever spared him from catching shit over not having a degree.   And shit rolls downhill.

My mother on the other hand, having grown up in Nicaragua, never had any kind of real opportunity for an education.    To her, an education was the golden goose.   It was a ticket to a long happy life of stability, like she never had.     It was this stability that she always envied about Americans, even more than having electricity and non-dirt floors.     The language barrier is what initially kept her from getting an education when she first immigrated, and later, the opportunity simply never arised.     So the bottom line when she had children was that they *had* to have what she could never have, whether they wanted it or not.

The end result of this is, my life began and ended with school and scholastic achievement.    Pressure to do well doesn't even begin to describe what I went through.   There wasn't a single aspect of my life they didn't hesitate to take control of if they felt the need.    It was all about me getting those letters behind my name,  and proper preparation to do so.      If there was absolutely anything I was doing that didn't directly pertain to me getting a degree, or some other constructive goal, I was made to suffer for it.     It started with how I dressed.   Sloppy or inappropriate (i.e. normal or comfortable) clothing was not condusive to study, therefore everything I wore, down to shoes (no sneakers allowed) was selected for me.    The end result of that was a 'nerd' and 'schoolboy' label that I didn't completely shake until my Senior year of high school.     Then it was about free time.   After age ten, if I did anything besides read a science or history book, or magazine or study something appropriate I was made to suffer for it.   Reading wasn't enough.   I had to be reading something that was considered appropriate.    If I watched TV, I caught hell for watching a show they didn't consider appropriate.     Even if it was something my parents loved.   My father was a hardcore Trekkie.   He never missed it.   When I discovered Star Trek and became a big fan at age eight, I caught hell for wasting brain power on learning about something make believe.    I lost count of how many nights my parents decided I wasn't doing something contructive, so I was made to sit and watch Nova, or Nature on PBS.  If I listened to music, unless it was something they considered appropriate (to my parents, there is only two kinds of music: classical, and noise) I caught hell about it.    My father was allowed to crank Bethoveen loud enough to rattle the windows, but if I turned up rock music loud enough to clearly hear it across a room, I was yelled at for destroying my hearing.    Any and all descisions of any consequence in my life were made for me.   There was never any discussion.   Homework was always a nightmare.    It wasn't enough to do it.   It wasn't enough to do it right as I got home from school.   After dinner, my father checked it over very carefully, and if it wasn't done to his satisfaction, it was done again.    If he really didn't like what I had done, I got yelled at again.   I remember very clearly a fight I had with him where he wasn't happy with how I had answered questions at the end of a section in my social studies book.   That quickly turned into a lecture on how we were all going to die in a nuclear war because of people like me who didn't care enough about other people to learn about them and take social studies seriously.    I got this lecture at age eleven.

Vacation was a special kind of hell.    The minute we drove anywhere that had any kind of terrain (i.e. either trees or water) that was different from New Mexico, Keith and I were both yelled at to stop reading, or stop playing and look out the window.    I remember very clearly one summer day in Yellowstone when I was reading my Star Wars story book.    I was bitched out for ten minutes about not living in the real world and appreciating where we were and what we were doing.